Crew picked to replace 3 now at space station

Veteran U.S. astronaut Ed Lu and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko were named Tuesday as the caretaker crew for the international space station.

The two will lift off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 26 for a six-month stay aboard the 240-mile-high orbital base, replacing current American and Russian tenants Ken Bowersox, Don Pettit and Nikolai Budarin.

Construction of the station was halted after the Feb. 1 loss of the shuttle Columbia, which grounded U.S. human spaceflights indefinitely.

Bowersox, Pettit and Budarin had been scheduled to return to Earth on March 13, following a 110-day mission. The Columbia loss, though, will extend their flight to 162 days. The three men will return aboard an older Soyuz capsule docked to the space station as a rescue vehicle.

Lu, 39, is a physicist and electrical engineer. A NASA astronaut since 1995, he made brief visits to Russia's Mir space station in 1997 and the international space station in September 2000 as a space shuttle crew member.

Malenchenko, 41, is a colonel in the Russian air force who served as Mir commander for four months in 1994 and participated in a September 2000 visit to the international space station aboard the shuttle Atlantis.

Lu and Malenchenko were selected over astronaut Mike Foale and cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri. Foale and Kaleri will continue to train in Russia and the United States in case a second caretaker crew is needed in October.

Prior to the Columbia accident, Malenchenko, Kaleri and Lu had been scheduled to lift off aboard the shuttle Atlantis for the space station on March 1 to replace Bowersox, Pettit and Budarin.

As one of their final duties aboard the orbital base, Bowersox and Pettit will embark on a near eight-hour spacewalk early Tuesday to bolster the electrical power supply to one of the station's four gyroscopes.

The gyros steer the space station as it circles Earth, ensuring that the orientation allows sufficient sunlight to reach the long solar arrays to generate electricity.

One of the gyros stopped operating in June. In recent weeks, a second gyro has experienced intermittent power lapses in one of two electrical cables.